Legacy
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Tal Celes helps a German shipmate deal with World War II guilt in the aftermath of "The Killing Game".


Legacy

By Laura Schiller

Based on Star Trek: Voyager

Copyright: Paramount

_A woman in a crisp gray suit, her blond hair styled in a bob, paused with her hands hovering above her typewriter and looked up at her superior, who was pacing around his office dictating a report. Kapitän Jäger smiled thinly, distracted in mid-paragraph, either by the swastika emblem behind her or by his own thoughts._

_"Has the Kommandant seemed … strange to you lately, Fräulein Ulrich?" he asked._

_"It's not my place to say, sir," his secretary replied. _

_"I suppose not. But I had the oddest encounter with him the other day." Jäger tugged on his uniform collar, as if something on his neck were hurting him. "Tell me … do you truly believe in the superiority of the Aryan race?"_

_Ulrich widened her mascaraed eyes. "But of course I do!"_

_"And that our destiny is to purify this world from the taint of Jews, homosexuals and other degenerates?"_

_"Absolutely. Why do you ask?"_

_"Good girl." He walked past her with another smile, this one wearily relieved. "At least _someone_ in this compound has her priorities straight … "_

Crewman Marianne Ulrich jabbed the pause button on the data padd that contained the holodeck surveillance video, pulled out her earbuds and threw the padd across the room. It hit the gray wall of her quarters and fell to the floor with a clatter. She made no move to pick it up.

"Please don't do that," came a tired croak from the opposite side of the room. "I'm trying to get some sleep."

"Sorry, Celes," she said automatically. "Good night."

The blanket was pushed back, revealing her Bajoran roommate blinking wide gray eyes in the 50 percent lighting. Tal Celes took one look at the padd and earbuds on the floor, then at Marianne, and made a deduction which would have surprised the senior staff considerably, if not the crewman who'd been sharing her quarters for four years.

"It's about the Hirogen, isn't it?"

"What makes you say that?" Marianne hedged. "We haven't run into them in over a month. We finally finished the repairs. If we're lucky, we'll never have to look at one again."

Celes sat up in bed to give her a pointed, _I-know-you-better-than-that_ look.

"I watched the vids too, Marianne."

Everyone had, once the replicators were up and running. The senior staff considered it only fair that everyone should have the chance to fill in the gaps in their memory. Many of the crew had chosen not to upload them, knowing how brutal the simulations had been. Marianne was not one of those people, and evidently, neither was Celes.

"You played Jäger's secretary, right? I played a courier for the Resistance, the one on the red bike. They had me down for the count pretty early though," she admitted, with her usual modest shrug, "So I was still in Sickbay when the holodeck blew up. Thank the Prophets."

"You _recognized_ me?"

Celes put on a reassuring smile, which fell rather flat. "I liked your hair."

"Oh, my God … " Marianne had a horrible mental image of these videos circulating across the ship. _That's her,_ the crew would whisper. _The Nazi secretary. _"Do you think they all recognized me? Golwat, Vorik, Tabor ... Commander Chakotay?"

"Pretty much. Are you embarrassed that they kept you out of the fighting?"

"Wha – no!" Watching herself put firing a gun at her own colleagues would have been even worse. "I was just lucky that time. Besides, you know the Hirogen. Even as a secretary, they would've had me fighting eventually if the senior crew hadn't saved us. It's not that, I … I just hate that they cast me as a German."

Spoken out loud, she realized how absurd it sounded, and so did Celes. Still, it was the closest words could come to expressing how she felt.

"But you _are_ a German, Marianne."

"Thanks for stating the obvious!"

Celes lowered her eyes in that apologetic way that never failed to make her roommate feel guilty. In a more level tone, she continued: "I'm the only member of the crew whom the Hirogen cast as an ally. Even though I never fired a shot, I feel like … like a traitor. I betrayed my crew, Starfleet … every ideal the Federation stands for. And I don't even remember doing it."

"That wasn't _you!_" Celes protested. "It was some character they made up. With that neural interface thing they put into us." She tapped the back of her own head.

"But it was my body. My own _name_ … everyone else had aliases, but not me. They even found out I'm single, for God's sake. What did they do, hack our personnel files? My name, my face, my stupid hair - " Marianne tugged at the roots of it, wondering if she could persuade the Doctor to give her a pigment change. "Everything was perfect for the role. I even have an accent like Jäger's. No wonder Cohen and Bronofsky were giving me those looks."

"I'm sure they'll get over it," Celes soothed, padding over in her navy blue Starfleet pyjamas to sit on the edge of Marianne's bed. "They never had a problem with you before. You make a great team."

She thought of their two fellow Astrometrics officers, occasional badminton partners or movie night companions, who'd been disconcertingly polite since the videos were released. She had already confronted them about it, and they had assured her cheerfully that of course they knew she didn't believe in that garbage – but the politeness continued, and she had no way of stopping it. It was strange; she'd rarely thought of them as Jewish before the World War II simulation, except when they argued with Neelix about kosher laws, or organized one of their holy days – but now she couldn't get the term out of her mind.

"I can't blame them, Celes. That speech of Jäger's in the video, when he convinced Turanj to go against Karr and break the ceasefire … his speech about the spears of his ancestors and the fall of the Jews … it hit them hard. Cohen and Bronofsky, I mean. They might've had ancestors who were killed in the Holocaust, for all we know. And even before that, on our world, prejudice against Jews goes back for thousands of years."

To Marianne, the mere fact that Celes did not ask about the word "Holocaust" was a confirmation of her point. Germany at its worst was so notorious, even a Bajoran with a shaky grasp on Federation history had heard of it before.

"Is it something about Germans, do you think?" she asked. "An economic depression and lack of leadership is one thing, but why did it lead to that? Is it something in our culture, our character, that made us ready to fall in with the first charismatic nut who came along? That made us so thoughtless, so – _inhuman _– that the Hirogen took us as their role models?"

"Marianne." Celes' tone was almost unbearably gentle, when Marianne's own voice had been inadvertently rising with every sentence until she was almost shouting. "Marianne, we both know it's nothing like that. I don't believe your race of humans is, or was, any more violent than most sentient species. Every planet has some dark spots in its history, you see. And charismatic nuts are often luckier than they deserve."

"They never let us forget, you know. The Americans and their allies, after the war. And of course it's only right to respect the victims, to bear witness, but sometimes … You know how in San Francisco, they have American flags everywhere? In the windows, flying from sailing ships, painted on shuttlecraft?"

"The ones with the red and white stripes?"

"Exactly. But where I come from, we just don't do that. Federation flags, yes. And you do get the odd German flag on a government building, but not that many."

She could picture it, the quiet cobblestoned streets of Schwerin, her northern hometown. The antique surface-bound trains chugging in and out of the station; the castle's reflection shining in the lake; licorice and gummy bears from the old apothecary; that one turquoise house in a row of white ones; the bakery where her mother still insisted on making breakfast rolls from scratch. Her idea of home had nothing to do with flags or the spears of her ancestors, and definitely not with blood of any sort.

"It's considered rude and just … wrong … to act loudly patriotic, because it reminds people of the Nazis. Except at soccer games, of course."

They both laughed at that, gesturing to a framed holo-still of the black-clad Hamburg SV team above Marianne's bed as evidence, but were quickly sobered by the topic at hand.

"When I was seventeen, my history teacher spent six months just on World War II. She took our class on a trip to Auschwitz – one of the death camps. They showed us the gas chambers, the ovens … there was even a holosuite. We couldn't have spent more than five minutes in there, but it was … it was … "

Marianne's throat choked her. She could almost smell the ashes of burning bodies again.

"Like Gallitep?" asked Celes, with grim understanding. Gallitep had been a labor camp during the Bajoran Occupation, which had become a byword for cruelty.

Marianne could only nod.

Celes glanced at her nightstand, where her clan earring, unworn according to Starfleet regulations, sat in a wooden box.

"The Occupation … God, Celes, I didn't think. I've got no right even complaining to you about this."

"And why is that?"

"Holodeck or no, World War II was four hundred years ago. Everyone who suffered by it is dead and gone. What I saw was just simulations. But you, you _lived_ through the Occupation. The Nazis … _we_ Nazis … must have seemed like Cardassians to you."

Celes gave Marianne a long, incredulous look, eyebrows raised, then leaned forward and snapped her fingers in the other girl's face. Marianne jumped.

"What was that for?"

"Because you're being ridiculous," Celes replied, in the clearest, most confident voice she'd used all night. "Just because the Hirogen cast you as a Nazi, doesn't mean you have to do it to yourself. Never mind what your ancestors did four hundred years ago. You're my friend and you've never done me any harm. Borrowing my toothbrush doesn't count."

Marianne nearly smiled, remembering all the little adjustments they'd had to make about the toothbrush issue – not to mention laundry, light levels, sleeping schedules and unacceptable music, among others – during those first months. Celes was her friend, there was no denying it. She could do much worse than take a friend's words to heart.

"And I get tired – seriously tired – of being a life-sized, ridge-nosed reminder of the Occupation for everyone I meet. Yes, I spent time in a refugee camp. Yes, I lost my parents when I was thirteen, and no, I don't like to talk about it. But that doesn't mean you get to pity me, absolutely not. Being pitied for my terrible job performance is bad enough. No, please don't say you're sorry. You're worse than Billy that way. You've been sorry enough tonight to last until we get to Earth. Can't you listen to your silly roommate when she's saying something wise for once in her life?"

Celes' irritation was what really brought her message home. The quiet Bajoran didn't waste her rare bursts of anger on things that did not matter. It was Marianne's turn to lower her eyes and stare at the gray blanket, apologizing with her gesture if not her words. Her friend was right. There was a difference between preserving the memory of a tragic or terrible event, in order to prevent it from happening again, and tormenting yourself over a past you could not change.

She looked up, and Celes' glare collapsed into a giggle. They hugged, blonde and black hair tangling together, a warmer, safer feeling than Marianne could have had from any official counseling session.

"You're right, Celes ... I was being ridiculous. Thanks for pointing that out to me. Next time someone calls you stupid, send them to me and I'll set them straight."

"So can we sleep now?" Celes asked plaintively. "If we're late again, Seven will – "

" – I know. Resistance is futile."

Marianne snuggled into her blanket, thumped her pillow to get its customary crease down the middle, and closed her eyes.

"Computer, lights off. Set alarm for 0500 hours."

_Acknowledged_, said the computer.

"Good night, oh wise roommate."

"Good night, Fräulein."


End file.
